I was asked on a job application to provide a link to some of my writing online and it occurred to me that since we (mostly) all emigrated to FBlandia, most of my written thoughts are in the course of a discussion (oh come now, most often an argument) there, or a one or two paragraph expression of a thought. Hardly a reasonable example of my ability (or lack thereof).

I miss writing over here. Maybe I will endeavor to start doing that again, for myself as much as anything.

years ago (i think while i was in korea, so 2004-2005) i came across an animated japanese piece online that was done, somewhat, in the traditional style of hokusai - two fishermen go out after The Big Fish and then back to one of their homes and... i don't recall anything but it had some more modern anime ish stuff segments kind of thrown in in the middle, then back to the more traditional style. pretty sure i posted it on livejournal but i cannot find it now. anyone recall this or what it was? around the time, i think, that kikoman! was making the rounds...

last night it hit me like a brick wall and i stood alone and blubbered like a baby outside the reach of the light of the junque.

i miss you. and it hurts. i'd been seeing both of you out of the corner of my mind all day, and certainly there had been mention of you both, still fresh news to some, but it hadn't really weighed anchor until i saw mikel's placard on the wall. the walk back in the dark, over the bridge and down the lanes didn't make it any better.

i hope there is peace or rainbows or whatever the hell wherever you are now, but i'm heartbroken and angry all over again.

if you are someone who regularly dumps your twitter posts here to lj, well, i probably don't see them because i long ago plonked you into my dev null friend group because i couldn't look at all that garbage anymore...

however, every once in a while, a few get through, and so, thanks to mhat's friend's link, here's a solution to that:

i'm really bad with alarm clocks. i like to sleep and i really hate to wake up "unnaturally". some can attest that waking me out of solid sleep can result in some violent reactions. i find no joy in seeing the sun rise unless i am still up. i feel no sense of 'win' by doing more before 8am than most people do all day. i am not a morning person.

my subconscious, apparently, is not either. for throughout my life, when there has been some mechanism intended to wake me up in the morning, the subconscious me (let's call her "trixi") has quite successfully been able to subvert the intention of those mechanisms - by getting up in the middle of the night and turning off the alarm, or resetting it, or figuring out how to disable it, one handed even, all while i am still asleep. we have a little giggle about it, trixi and me, because only rarely has the result been that i have terribly overslept. no harm no foul. the only thing that has successfully worked in waking me up regularly has been voices - slowly pulling me up out of dream land as my brain tries to focus on what they are saying. it is a pretty gentle re-entry into the waking world but it works.

i have a clock radio. it's been sitting, unplugged, on top of my tv here in the house for over a year. before that it had been in a box since i moved out of das bitch haus on franklin back in... 2003? and before that it had been up on my dresser in my bedroom at that house, unplugged, since, now that i think about it, shortly after the attacks on new york and washington.

on the morning of the attacks the radio alarm came on, but instead of the usual hee haw jackassery and loud horns and silly voices, it was a bit restrained. i was only half awake and i remember laying there wondering if my housemate had for some reason changed the station to npr, maybe the loud obnoxious radio show was annoying him too. once the words started coming into focus, i got up, turned off the radio and turned the tv on just in time to see the second plane....a few weeks ago i really needed to be up early to get some stuff done before a meeting. i was about to head out to go buy a cheap little alarm clock when i remembered the clock radio i already owned, sitting there on the tv, unused. i plugged it in and, not terribly surprising, it was still tuned to roughly the same station it was when i last unplugged it some 8 years ago. i had chosen that station because, at the time, they had an INCREDIBLY annoying morning radio show that would be enough to wake me up and encourage me to get up and turn it off. turns out the station there now has a pretty obnoxious show in the morning too.

i plugged it in and set it and it did it's job that morning i needed it, so i've left it set to "on" since. it appears sneaky trixi has already mastered the art of turning off/resetting the alarm on my phone, a touch screen, which is quite an impressive feat if you take into consideration that she does so with my eyes closed, i think, so the radio alarm is nice.

...i do not remember when exactly i unplugged the clock back in 2001. i think it was about the time the morning show had returned to it's previous state of irritation, but at that point the goofy stuff started to seem offensive to me. i certainly did not expect them to remain in a state of shock and despair, but the honking horns and silly sound effects did not fit into my state of mind at all. i also couldn't listen to any of the other stations, because i did not want to hear any more news about the attacks or the response or the aftermath or the president or the government or the taliban or anything. i could not listen or watch any more. so i unplugged the clock....last year i thought i was ready to watch or attend some of the memorial stuff, but when the day came, i just did not want to and so avoided media and public gatherings.

last night i set the alarm so i could get up this morning and get moving in time to get down to the capitol building and listen to a friend and the emergency response pipe and drum corp play in the rotunda. somewhere in the night trixi unplugged the clock. i woke up anyway and puttered around the house, got dressed and got in the car. i started to drive downtown, but something made me turn around and come back home. the tv will remain off today and i will once again not be looking at any news sites, and any friends deep detailed remembrances of what they were doing blah blah blah will go unread by me. the clock will remain unplugged.

i have an account on a free site that, when it originally started, was just a bunch of the silly quizzes that are now the bread and butter over at facebook (and it had an interesting im program, which i think is what i was initially there to look at, as it related to ding, if that give you an idea how long ago this was). at some point they tried to be a social networking site and finally evolved into a dating site. because it's a free site, i have, throughout the years, come across pretty much everyone else i know in austin who is single (and some who weren't) which was always funny and awkward and led to some pretty amusing looks when next we saw each other in public. it's not what i would call a high traffic place, and i get maybe one email or poke from it every couple weeks, most completely ignorable... i am not convinced that the web-dating sites are any more effective or useful than walking into a 7-11 at just the right moment, and the following email i received last night is a good example why. am cutting and pasting, so the creative spelling is all his.